Ganymede-pathos? “_Mit tausendfacher Liebeswonne sich an mein Herz
drängt deiner ewigen Wärme heilig Gefühl._”... “_Aufwärts an deinen
Busen, alliebender Vater!_” Does it not find expression in his
pantheism, which is only the objectivation of his feeling, in such
wise that his own utter surrender gives him to know the divine not as
something from without, but as irradiating him through and through?
In any case, this organic sympathy, this living interest, is entirely
directed toward life, toward the “_ewige Wärme_”; whereas--and what
could be more characteristic of the difference between these two,
nature’s great children?--Tolstoy’s strongest, most tormenting,
deepest, and most productive interest has to do with death. It is
the thought of death which dominates his thoughts and writing, to
such an extent that one may say no other great master of literature
has felt and depicted death as he has--felt it with such frightful
penetration, depicted it so insatiably often. Tolstoy’s poetic genius
for questioning death is the pendant to Goethe’s intuition in the field
of natural science; and sympathy with the organic is at the bottom of
both. Death is a very sensual, very physical business; and it would be
hard to say whether Tolstoy was so interested in death because he was
so much and so sensually interested in the body, and in nature as the
life of the body, or whether it was the other way about. In any case,
in his fixation with death, _love_ comes into play too: for the fear of
death, this source of Tolstoy’s poetry and his feeling for religion, is
fear of the love of nature, it is the negative, naturalistic other side
of Goethe’s Ganymede-impulse.
“_Du führst_,” says Goethe-Faust to the Earth-Spirit:
“_Du führst die Reihe der Lebendigen
Vor mir vorbei und lehrst mich meine Brüder
Im stillen Busch, in Luft und Wasser kennen._”
“My brothers.” We know that it was Goethe who took in all seriousness
the idea of “man’s close relation to the beast,” and that before
science had got far enough on to do so; his possession by this thought,
this profound and true intuition, shows us the child of nature in all
his sympathy with the organic. Schiller’s humanity, his conception of
man, which was at bottom emancipatory, haughtily inimical to nature,
would have found little pleasure in such a conception; and one does
not discover ideas to which one is unsympathetic; that is to say,
ideally unsympathetic. There is not such a thing as an assumptionless
science. Scientific discoveries are always the result of an ideal
assumption: the mediæval statement “_Credo ut intellegam_” is eternally
right. Belief is the organ of knowledge; and without the preconceived,
previsioned idea of a unified plan on which is based the development
of the higher vertebrate world, including man--in the plant world the
conception of the “primitive plant”--Goethe never would have found the
_os intermaxillare_ in man. I may speak of the amusing contradiction
between his discovery and the humanistic explanation he gave it. He
says that the intermaxillary bone is variously shaped, in animals,
according to circumstance and necessity; but that when it came to man,
the highest in the scale, it hid itself for shame, “afraid of betraying
an animal voracity.” Ideal human pride might retort that it was truly
inhuman to spy out the shamefaced hidden bone and bring it to the light.
Yet how remarkable and significant it is to see Goethe’s medical and
biological interest being seasoned from the start with the humanistic,
with his concern with man and his beauty! And consequently with art
too; since art with Goethe was a humanistic discipline, and all the
disciplines and faculties of human endeavour, human wisdom, human
power, were seen by him as variations and adumbrations of one and
the same great compelling and enchanting interest and concern, which
is man. To study humanity from the angle of medicine and the natural
sciences did not lie in his family tradition, as it did in Schiller’s
and Dostoyevsky’s, both of whom were sons of physicians, and neither
of whom gave a thought to man’s physical side. On the other hand, we
know that ever since his Leipsic days Goethe had occupied himself with
medicine, associated every day with medical men in Strasburg, worked
in the dissecting-rooms, spent time in the obstetrical clinic and the
clinic for internal diseases. The spirit in which he pursued these
studies, the kind of interest he took in them, is clear from the fact
that he himself later in life lectured to young artists in the academy
on the bony structure of the body. The same thing comes out even
plainer in the words he puts into the mouth of Wilhelm Meister in the
_Wanderjahre_, when the hero takes his surgical training. His primary
interest is in anatomy; and we get some very curious information on the
point of previous preparation in a quite different field of activity.
“By a peculiar method, which no one would guess, I had already made
good progress in knowledge of the human frame; and this was during my
theatrical career. When you come down to it, the physical man, after
all, plays the principal rôle there--a fine man, a fine woman! If
the manager is lucky enough to have got hold of these, the writers
of comedy and tragedy are assured. The free footing upon which such
society lives makes their associates more familiar with the peculiar
beauty of the uncovered limbs than any other relationship; different
costumes often oblige them to make visible what otherwise is generally
concealed. On this point I might have much to say, as also of physical
defects which the sensible actor must recognize in himself or others,
in order, if not to correct, at least to hide them. In this way I was
sufficiently prepared to give consistency to the anatomical course
which taught me to know the outer parts more accurately, whilst
the inner parts too were not strange to me, inasmuch as a certain
perception of them had always been present to me.”
This is, I repeat, a significant bit of information. We learn, not
only that the acquaintance with the human form, which Wilhelm owed to
the “free footing” of theatrical life, was a happy preparation for his
anatomical studies; but also that both, his leaning to the theatre and
his interest in medicine, were expressions of one and the same profound
interest, his sympathy with the organic and its highest revelation,
the human form--an interest, and a sympathy, not far removed, as I
said, from Eros. For instance, when Wilhelm Meister, one day in the
dissecting-room, finds that his subject is “the most beautiful female
arm that ever twined itself about a young man’s neck”--and cannot bring
himself to mutilate with his instruments this “glorious manifestation
of nature.” Out of this incident there comes about his acquaintance
with that remarkable man, the “plastic anatomist,” a sculptor who
prepares from wax or other material anatomical dissections possessing
the fresh colour and appearance of the natural subjects, in the
hope of employing his ingenuity and fertility of method to make the
demonstrations more valuable to students and medical practitioners
the world over. There follow the most pregnant conversations upon
the association of plastic art and anatomical knowledge, and the two
intertwine in the most wonderful way when the master “cast in a shaped
mass the beautiful torso of a youth and now was skilfully trying to
divest the ideal form of the epidermis, to change the beautiful shapes
of life into a veritable preparation of muscular tissue.”
Here the prose work of Goethe’s later period refers to his own youthful
thoughts and experiences as a student. He had early discovered and
stated that a knowledge of nature and a knowledge of art reciprocally
heighten each other. “As I observe nature,” he wrote from Rome, “so I
now observe art, and win what I have so long striven after, a perfect
conception of the highest that has been accomplished by man; and _my
soul gets formed_ more on this side and looks into a freer field.”
“Architecture and sculpture and painting are to me now like mineralogy,
botany, and zoology,” he says in a letter to Herder. And again: “We can
finally rival nature by the use of art only when we have learned from
her, at least to some extent, the way she proceeds in the formation of
her works.... The human form cannot be comprehended merely by looking
at the surface of it; one must lay bare its inwardness, disjoin its
parts, observe the connexion between them, note the dissimilarities,
be instructed in the action and counter-action, print upon one’s mind
the hidden and dormant and basic features of a phenomenon, if one wants
really to see and imitate it as it moves, a beautiful, indivisible
whole, in living waves before our eyes.” These are Goethe’s words, and
who could doubt their truth? Who would deny that it advantages the
artist to have knowledge of something beneath the skin, so that he can
paint what is not seen as well as what is: in other words, if he stand
to nature in another relation besides the lyrical, if, for example, he
is a physician on the side, a physiologist, an anatomist, and quietly
knows what he knows about the _dessous_ as well? The envelope of a
human body consists not only of the mucous membrane and cornea of the
epidermis, but underneath one has to imagine the corium with its oil
and sweat glands, blood-vessels and tubercles, and under that again the
adipose tissue, the upholstery that lends the form its charm. But what
the artist knows and thinks tells too: it flows into his hand and has
its effect; it is not there and yet somehow it is, and just this it
is that gives perspicuousness. Art, I repeat, is only one humanistic
discipline among others; all of them, philosophy, jurisprudence,
medicine, theology, even the natural sciences and technology as well,
are only variations and subspecies of one and the same high and
interesting theme--toward which we can never take up a sufficiently
varied and many-sided attitude, for it is man; and the _human form_ is
the summary of them all, it is, to speak with Goethe, “the _non plus
ultra_ of all human knowledge and activity, the alpha and omega of all
things known unto us.”
* * * * *
Autobiography, and education. The two conceptions meet again when
we envisage this idea of the human form, this loftiest expression
of our sympathy with the organic. Yes, in view of this idea, so
genuinely creative, the two conceptions flow into one humane whole:
the pedagogic element resides, consciously or unconsciously (and if
unconsciously, so much the better), in the autobiographic; it follows
from it, it grows out of it.
Goethe somewhere calls Wilhelm Meister his “beloved likeness (_sein
geliebtes Ebenbild_).” In what sense? Does a man love his own
likeness? Unless he suffer from hopeless self-complacency, should
not the sight of it make him aware of his own shortcomings? Yes, of
course, it should. And this very awareness of a need of improvement
and completion, this consciousness of his own ego as a task, a moral,
æsthetic, cultural obligation, becomes objective in the hero of the
autobiographical novel, the epic of education. To this personage the
creative ego acts as guide, philosopher, and friend--at once identical
and superior--to an extent that makes Goethe once refer to his Wilhelm
as “a poor dog.” The phrase bespeaks a parental tenderness, not only
toward the poor fellow in his _dunklen Drange_ whom he created in his
own image, but also toward himself. And thus, at the very heart of the
autobiographic pathos there takes place the turn for the pedagogic.
And this process of objectivation goes on in Wilhelm Meister through
the introduction of the society of the Turm, which takes in hand
his destiny and human development and leads him in mysterious ways.
More and more plainly in the _Lehrjahre_ does the original idea of a
personally conducted adventure in self-improvement tend toward the
pedagogic; until in the _Travels_ it issues entirely in the social,
yes, even in the political. At the end of the _Faust_ there is an
unmistakable flashing-up in poetry of the same vision of the union of
self and society in the educational process. For the Enlightened, who
on earth “_immer strebend sich bemüht_”, is received on high by the
youthful saved, who sing:
“_Wir wurden früh entfernt
Von Lebechören;
Doch dieser hat gelernt,
Er wird uns lehren._”
Nobody has ever loved his own ego, nobody was ever egocentric, in the
sense of conceiving of his own ego as a cultural task and toiling
early and late in pursuance of it, without reaping, almost as though
by accident, educational influence in the outer world, and the joy and
dignity of a leader and former of youth. The harvest never comes save
at the height of life, and the moment of his realization of it is the
sublime moment in the life of the productive human being. He never
foresees, or even suspects, the moment beforehand. The autobiographical
“poor dog,” with his mind from his youth up wholly on the difficulties
of ploughing his own furrow, or, in the religious phrase, on the saving
and justification of his own soul, will not have imagined he can teach
anything, to improve or to convert men. Yet the day comes when, still
incredulous, still astonished, he realizes that he has been teaching
while he learned--shaping, guiding, leading, training, putting his own
stamp on youth, by the power of words, by that lofty instrument of
culture which is Eros-filled and binds the hearts of men. And from the
day of his realization this knowledge possesses his whole life with
a certainty, a creative bliss which leaves far behind it all ordinary
human joys of love and fatherhood--just as the life of the mind is
wont to exceed all personal and sensual things in value, beauty, and
splendour.
* * * * *
“I am reading Goethe. My mind teems,” Tolstoy wrote in his journal at
the beginning of the sixties. He was then a man of some thirty years
and had not long returned to Russia and begun his work as a preaching
and practising pedagogue. What was he reading? Was it contact with
German idealism and humanism that made his mind so to “teem”? It was
an alien sphere to him. For in Tolstoy (otherwise than in Goethe), the
origin of the pedagogic impulse was immediately social and ethical.
A man of parts and attainments, said he, must share with those who
lack such blessings before he can derive pleasure from them himself.
The motive seems _a poor one_ to me; rationalizing and humanitarian,
like all the conscious thought of the great artist just then, I find
it deeply inferior to the beautiful humanity of Goethe, in whom the
social ideal was an organic outgrowth of the cultural and educational.
But what Tolstoy thought was usually smaller than what he was. And
to come back to our starting-point: what was it made his mind “teem”
when he read Goethe and at the same time set to work as single-handed
schoolmaster and founder of a primary school to put into practice the
pedagogic ideas that rumbled in his belly?
Or, rather, to experiment with them. For he had made up his mind to
settle, by actual experiment, what it was that the people, and in
particular youth, wanted to be taught; it had not been settled, and
that it had to be settled was his primary pedagogical thesis. “The
people,” he said, “this most interested party in the whole situation,
party and judge in one, listens quietly to our more or less ingenious
exposition as to the best way of preparing and presenting its mental
fodder. It is not disturbed; for it perfectly knows that in the great
business of its mental development it will never take a false step, or
accept anything that is false; and that all efforts to force it into
paths unsuited to it, for instance German paths, will be like water
on a duck’s back.” One must recognize, Tolstoy declares in writing
and controversy, that the German type of school is a desirable one;
that is a fact for which history vouches. But, even so, one may as
a Russian hesitate to enter the lists in favour of a primary school
which does not yet exist there. What historical argument can be brought
for the assertion that Russian schools must be like those in the
rest of Europe? The people, he says, need education, and every human
being seeks it unconsciously. The more highly cultivated classes,
society, and government officials, seek to extend the benefits of
their knowledge and to educate the less educated masses. One would
suppose that such a concurrence of the needs of both classes, the
giving as well as the receiving, would suffice. But no. The masses
steadily oppose all efforts made in their behalf to educate them, so
that these are often entirely futile. Whose is the fault? Which is
more justified: the opposition, or the system against which it is
directed? Must the opposition be broken or the system altered? The
latter, Tolstoy decides, is the case. “Shall we not,” he asks, “confess
honourably and openly that we do not, cannot, know what the needs of
the coming generations will be; but that we feel none the less bound
to investigate? That we will not charge the masses with ignorance
because they will not accept our education; but rather accuse ourselves
of both ignorance and arrogance if we go on trying to educate them on
our own lines? Let us at last cease to see hostility in the resistance
of the people to our system; and find in it the expression of the
people’s will, which alone should guide us. Let us at last accept the
fact, so clearly evinced by the whole history of pedagogics, that if
the educating class are to know what is good and what bad, the class
to be educated must have full power to register dissatisfaction,
and opportunity to reject a system which they instinctively find
unsatisfying; that, in short, _freedom_ is the sole criterion of
educational methods.”
“The sole criterion of education is freedom, the sole method
experience, experimentation.” This is Tolstoy’s first and highest
pedagogic maxim. According to him, the school should be at once a means
of education and an experiment performed on the rising generation, an
experiment productive of ever new results. It should, in other words,
be an educational laboratory, where the experiment of pedagogic science
seeks to create a firm basis for itself. To do this, it is necessary
that it function under circumstances that ensure the value of its
results--that is, in freedom. The school as it is, Tolstoy declares,
enfeebles the children by distorting their mental faculties. During
the most precious period of development it wrenches the child out of
the family circle, robs him of the joy of freedom, and makes of him
a jaded, suppressed creature, upon whose face rests an expression of
weariness, fear, and boredom, while with his lips he repeats strange
words in a language he does not know. But if we give the people freedom
during their training, then we also give them the chance to speak out
on the score of their necessities, and furthermore to choose among
the kinds of knowledge offered. Philosophers from Plato to Kant have
unanimously striven to free the school from the fetters of tradition.
They have sought to discover wherein the intellectual needs of man
consist, and to build up new schools on these more or less correctly
envisaged needs. Luther demands that the masses shall study the
Scripture from the original text, and not from the commentaries of the
Fathers. Bacon advises the study of nature from nature herself and not
from the works of Aristotle. Rousseau wants to teach life _from life_,
as he conceives it, and not from outworn experience. All philosophy
stands for freeing the school from the idea of instructing the younger
generation in that which the older generation held to be science; and
in favour of the idea of teaching them what they themselves need. And
we can see by the history of pedagogic science that every step forwards
consists in greater natural _rapport_ between pupil and teacher, in
less compulsion and greater facilitation of the process of learning.
Tolstoy, then, an anarchistic pedagogue, sets his face against
discipline. “The school in which there is less compulsion,” he says,
“is better than the one in which there is more. The method which can
be introduced without increased disciplinary strain is good; one which
requires greater severity is surely wrong. Take a school like mine and
try to carry on conversations about tables and corners of rooms or
shove little dice to and fro. A frightful disorder will reign at once,
and it will be absolutely necessary to restore order. But tell them an
interesting story or set them an interesting task, or let someone write
on the board and the others correct, and _let them all out of their
benches_, and they will all be busy, and there will be no mischief, and
no increased discipline will be necessary. We may safely say that this
way is good.”
“The children bring nothing with them,” thus Tolstoy describes the
procedure at Yasnaya Polyana, “neither primers nor copy-books. There
are no tasks to take home. They need not remember anything--nothing
of what they did the day before. They need carry nothing, either in
their hands or in their heads. They bring nothing with them but their
receptive natures and the conviction that school will be just as jolly
today as it was yesterday; they only think of the instruction when it
has begun. No one who comes late is ever scolded, and they never come
late, except some of the older ones, whose fathers occasionally keep
them to work. When that happens, they run as fast as they can to school
and get there breathless.”
Lucky village children of Yasnaya Polyana! But it is comprehensible
that Tolstoy tries to make the school at least pleasant for his pupils;
his faith in its educational value is weak, and he makes in the end no
secret of his conviction--which he declares he derived from personal
observation in the schools of Paris, Marseilles, and other cities of
western Europe--that the greater part of popular education is gained,
not from school, but from life; and that free public instruction,
by means of lectures, clubs, books, exhibitions, and so on, remains
far superior to any teaching in schools. But be that as it may; what
interests us here is not the rightness or wrongness of Tolstoy’s ideas,
but rather what is characteristic in them; and characteristic they
certainly are, in the highest degree, and from every point of view, not
only in a personal sense, but also as a sign, even as an augury of his
time.
What strikes one first of all, then, is a note that sounds in clearest
contradiction to certain other of his doctrines: to the pacifistic and
antinational ones, to the thesis of democratic equality he preached
in his latter days. It is the national note. He emphasizes the
right of the Russian people to an education suited to their genius,
independently of the foreign spirit. His root-and-branch Russianism,
at this time still quite unregenerate, denies the right of the upper
and official classes, with their west-European liberal education, to
force upon the masses an education not suited to their actual needs.
Here he is turning against Peter the Great, who created these official
classes and gave them their orientation toward liberalism and the
west. Tolstoy’s educational ideas are all extreme anti-“Petrinic,”
anti-western, anti-progressive. He openly declares that the educated
class is not capable of giving the masses their proper training,
conceiving, as it does, that the well-being of the people lies in the
direction of civilization and progress. What speaks out of Tolstoy’s
mouth, what rules his thinking, is Moscow. It is that leaning toward
Asia which so alarmed Turgeniev and others like him in Tolstoy’s
writings and which here is elevated to a pedagogic principle. His
anarchism, his faith in the anarchistic principle as the single
reasonable basis of communal human life; his doctrine that absolute
freedom makes all discipline superfluous--all these are part of it, and
it and they are expressed in Tolstoy’s prescription to “let all the
children out of the benches” and free them from every oppressive sense
of duty.